fall garden

The local Plant a Row for the Hungry (PAR) gardeners plan to cut back on their whole-group meetings through much of the winter. That doesn’t mean the gardeners won’t still be providing garden-fresh produce to a local food pantry, but it does mean that they are using the reduced workload of the winter garden to take a break.

Instead of meeting as a whole group every week (the usual schedule), PAR gardeners are signing up in pairs to harvest and deliver greens and root-crops. If the garden seems to need more attention, larger-group workdays can be scheduled, but those will be less frequent. There is no need for watering or continuous weeding, and no more heavy work like spreading mulch, until spring comes back around.

Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.

Last week’s workday was the last major workday for the season. While some gardeners harvested, weighed, and bagged greens for delivery, others pulled the last of the peppers and eggplants. A freeze was tentatively forecast for the weekend, with a bigger chance of freezing early this week. An early-week freeze looks less likely as the target-dates get closer, but it was good to move those plants out of the garden while there was a small crowd of gardeners to complete the task.

Even better, there was a basket-load of peppers to deliver to the food pantry, in addition to the greens.

Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.

In the next week or so, the irrigation system will be turned off. Turning the system off and draining it for the winter will protect the equipment from freeze damage. This is a more complicated task (than pulling up old crops, for example) to prepare the garden for cold weather, but it is important for the success of next spring’s garden.

Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.

Gardeners who are new to fall/winter gardening in the South may be unsure about how much to harvest each week from the garden. It may help to know the guidelines the PAR gardeners discussed, to guide their harvest of winter crops:

Closer view of one ‘Red Russian’ kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.

For leafy greens, harvest lowest/outer/larger leaves.

Harvest no more than 1/3 of the mass of any leafy greens plant each week.

Wait for warm-enough temperatures (above 32 degrees F, with no frost on the leaves) to harvest any/all of the crops/

For root crops (beets, daikon radishes, etc), pull the entire plant at harvest, including the leaves. Those are good food, too.

For the broccoli, some leaves can be harvested before the actual head of broccoli is ready to harvest — leaves of broccoli plants taste pretty much like broccoli; harvest sparingly, though, so plants have enough energy to make a good-sized head of broccoli.

Some of the many kinds

The first variety I grew may have been ‘Italiko rosso’, a loose-leaf type with red leaf-veins running through its dark green leaves. Others have been ‘Pan di zucchero’, a less bitter variety that makes a head like Romaine lettuces, and ‘Catalogna’, an all-green loose-leaf type. Including chicory in our meals turns out to have been good practice for traveling in Italy, because at restaurants we visited, the cooked greens served with the second course of a meal often were chicory, not spinach.

Bringing home seeds from Italy isn’t allowed, but these two packets were emptied prior to travel. The packets are 7.5 x 4.5 inches — huge!

Radicchio, a heading-plant that is usually red instead of green, is also a kind of chicory. Endive and escarole are other forms of chicory that are familiar in the U.S.

These are all good to think about right now because they are cool-season crops that we can plant in our fall gardens. In general, the loose-leaf forms mature in 45-55 days, and so do most of the radicchios. Those can be planted in my area (zone 7b, with a first frost around Nov. 1) in a couple of weeks.

The heading type ‘Pan di zucchero’ takes 80 or more days to mature — it should already be coming up in the gardens of anyone nearby who wanted to grow it. Gardeners south of Atlanta, with later frost dates, still have time to get that variety started.

All of the above chicories are grown for their leaves, which are a lot less bitter in fall/winter/spring than in summer.

Chicory in the kitchen

I haven’t served chicory as a pile of cooked greens, Italian-style, at home, even when they haven’t been bitter. I am not a huge fan of cooked greens. Instead, I usually add raw leaves to a salad or to soups or sauces, where they end up cooked.

If I were going to cook chicory as a “mess of greens”, I would drop them into boiling water, let cook for about half a minute, drain off the water, then finish cooking in fresh water, just like for any other potentially-bitter green (collards, mustards). When we cook greens this way (because Joe does like greens), much of the bitterness goes down the drain with the water that we pour off.

The chicory in my garden right now

This year, I planted seeds for ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, a variety that has a bigger, tastier root for making chicory coffee.

The seeds went into the garden a few weeks before we left town, but the seedlings were not big enough for me to mulch their patch before we left for the summer. When we got back, the patch was a weedy mess. Among the weeds, though, were some chicory plants.

I weeded as carefully as I could but ended up pulling some chicory plants with the weeds in spite of the care. A few days later, yard-bunnies found the patch and nibbled it nearly to the ground. Wild yard-bunnies can be hard on a garden.

Deciding what to do about wildlife damage is not easy. There are many options for “pest control”, most of which don’t work. In the end, I poked some sticks into the ground near each plant, thinking that the sticks would be an annoyance for the bunnies.

As the plants regrew, the bunnies returned. Last week, I added a lot more sticks to the bunny-blockade. The more-crowded assemblage of sticks looks strange, but it seems to be working.

If all else fails and the bunnies are undeterred, I may be able to find a patch of wild chicory to use in making coffee. The bright blue flowers are easy to spot. The hard part will be finding a patch in an unpolluted place (not by a road, for example), where I can get permission to harvest the roots.

Chicory flowers in Italy are the same as those that grow wild here. PHOTO/Amygwh

The first seeds in the ground for my fall garden are two kinds of carrots and a winter radish. I also planted one last round of basil, so there will be more pesto in my freezer to use in wintertime meals.

First seeds planted for my fall garden, plus one last summer herb. PHOTO/Amygwh

This year’s carrots: ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’

The two varieties, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’, are shorter carrots that will do well in the clay soil of my in-ground garden.

‘Short stuff’ is also recommended as a good choice for container plantings. The fully-mature carrots will be only about 4-inches long, but wide at the top.

‘Bolero’ will be longer, closer to 6-inches at harvest, but slender all the way down.

I amended the soil by adding a nearly-full bucket (5-gallon size) of yard compost to the garden bed before planting. This addition will loosen the soil and improve the odds that the carrots will grow as they should.

The seedlings have not yet come up, but when they do, they will get a dose of the kind of fish emulsion fertilizer that promotes root growth (higher phosphorus than nitrogen).

You may be wondering why I already planted seeds for carrots, in mid-August. The reason is that crops mature more slowly in fall than in spring. If I want to harvest carrots before mid-December, they need to be in the ground, in my garden, now. (For more details, read my book.)

The first winter radishes

‘Watermelon’ winter radish seeds also are in the garden. The current packet says they take 60 days to reach maturity, but older packets from other seed companies have claimed 70-days, which is closer to the speed they grew in my garden. I decided to use 70-days as my working number to determine the planting date, as a result.

Most of the winter radishes will only make good bulbs in fall, in the time of shortening day length. I don’t know why. Some plants are just like that.

That means, though, that this is a crop that can ONLY be had from a fall garden. If anyone in your family loves radishes (a rare thing, I know), plant these soon!

Heat sink surprise

Raised bed with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago. PHOTO/Amygwh

When I was in Chicago last week, I noticed that many vegetable gardens already contained plenty of cool-season seedlings. Considering how much further north Chicago is from here, it made sense that fall gardening would already be well-underway.

However, when I looked up its hardiness zone, I was surprised. Chicago is in plant hardiness zone 6a, according to the newer USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The plant hardiness zone where I live, north of Atlanta, is 7b. That difference in hardiness zones, between Chicago and north-metro-Atlanta, is less than I expected.

Most of area around Chicago (all the northern half of Illinois) is in plant hardiness zone 5, according to the USDA map. That seems more reasonable than 6a. Chicago, which is a large city containing a lot of concrete, must be the same kind of heat-sink that Atlanta is (most of Atlanta is in zone 8a). That could account for part of the difference. Lake Michigan could account for the rest, since enormous bodies of water also help keep nearby air temperatures more moderate.

Update on the ‘Astia’ zucchini

Flower bud on young ‘Astia’ zucchini plant, in the “v” between two stems (main stem and leaf petiole).

The ‘Astia’ zucchini that is growing in my half-barrel planter is still alive. There are no signs yet of leaf-mildew-diseases, which is good news. The other good news is that, even though the seedlings have only been up for a couple of weeks, I can see the buds of flowers forming on the plants.

These flower buds will keep growing, until the flower buds open. Some flowers will be “girls”, which are the ones that make the zucchini that we eat. Some flowers will be ‘boys’. After the boys have done their job of pollinating the girls, I plan to harvest those boy flowers to use in cooking.

While in Italy over the summer, Joe and I enjoyed fried squash blossoms at the Sax Wine Bar in Montepulciano. We are going to make those ourselves, since the good ladies at Sax Wine Bar are in Italy and we are not.

If you don’t already have the seeds you need to plant a fall veggie garden, and you live near me (one county north of Atlanta), it would be a good idea to go find them soon. I was checking my own planting calendar, and any crop with a days-to-maturity of 70-80 days needs to be planted within the next week or so.

A lot of fall crops will mature in less time, so they don’t need to planted quite so soon. Also, if you are planning to buy plants, you have oodles of time. Fall vegetable plants won’t show up in garden centers for a few more weeks. When they do, that is the time to purchase and set them into the garden, providing a bit of shade to ease the transplants into their new lives in the ground.

Seedlings of ‘Astia’ zucchini for containers, coming up in my half-barrel planter. PHOTO/Amygwh

There’s still time for a late planting of some summer crops

If you have not yet had enough summer vegetables, bush beans are a crop that matures quickly. Bush bean seeds planted now, in metro-Atlanta, will yield plenty of delicious beans before the first frost.

Last year, I planted bush beans in early August, and I was very glad that I did.

This year when I got back from Italy, I planted a few seeds of a different warm season crop that is supposed to mature quickly. The crop is a kind of zucchini, ‘Astia’ (from Renee’s Garden), bred for growing in containers. The little plants are supposed to produce harvest-sized veggies in about 50 days. Harvest-size for ‘Astia’ is smaller than for most zucchini, but that is ok.

In the past, when I have planted a second crop of zucchini, they have avoided being attacked by the squash bugs and squash vine borers. Sadly, a mildew-fungus killed the plants before the veggies were big enough to harvest. I have never planted zucchini this late, though, so I am curious how the experiment will turn out. You will be among the first to know!

Presentations and workshops

In other news, I gave a Fall Garden Planning presentation at a local community garden (Hyde Farm) on Saturday, and the gardeners there were awesome! It is great to know more people who value good food and want to grow some of their own.

On Saturday, August 25th, at 7 (note new time!!!) 3 pm, I will be giving a similar presentation at TruPrep. One great thing about this particular store is that it stocks seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Also, unlike many garden centers that are associated with home improvement stores, TruPrep is likely to still have plenty of seeds in the store. If you need seeds and are in the neighborhood, check there.

Other upcoming events for me include a Pollinator Symposium in Conyers, GA, at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, on September 22. Monarchs Across Georgia, a group I volunteer for, is putting on the Symposium. I am scheduled to talk about pesticides (imidacloprid in particular) in half of an hour-long afternoon session that I am sharing with a person who will talk about growing milkweeds from seed.

In the Southern U.S., we plant garlic in the fall, and the best garlics for our relatively mild winters are the soft-neck garlics. These are also the ones that can be braided, if the leaves are left on at harvest.

Regardless of the garlic you choose to grow, it helps to take time to prepare the planting space for the crop. As always, add more compost to the bed. Mixing in some organic fertilizer, following package directions, is usually also a good idea.

To plant, separate a head of garlic into cloves, leaving the papery wrappings on the cloves. Lay the cloves out on the prepared planting space in either the rows or the grid pattern that you choose to have them grow in. Make sure the cloves are spaced at least four inches apart. Five or six inches space between cloves would not be too much.

Then, push each clove down into the soil, pointy-end up, so that the tip of the clove is about an inch or inch-and-a-half below the surface. Smooth over the top of the bed to cover the cloves, then water them well enough to settle the soil around them.

Why not plant hard-neck garlics? The hard-necked garlics that form beautiful, curved scapes (flower-and-seed heads) in late spring, sometimes featured in magazine photos, do not always produce good heads of garlic in Southern gardens.

Hard-neck garlics grown in the South do not always form up well

Some years, of course, they do just fine.

Other years, the single clove that is planted, instead of forming a head of equal-sized cloves, will expand to become one giant clove (golf-ball size!) that has several tiny cloves formed around it, as in the nearby picture. The tiny ones don’t all come out of the ground when the “head” of garlic is pulled up in June, and those sometimes will grow into a head of garlic in a year or two. Growing hard-neck garlic in the South is a bit of a different experience.

Where do I find garlic for planting? Soft-neck garlics are usually the ones sold in grocery stores, in the produce section. If you buy an organically-grown head of garlic, it won’t have been treated with chemicals that prevent sprouting, and you can use cloves from that head of garlic for planting.

You can also order specific varieties of garlic from seed catalogs. A quarter pound of garlic may be the smallest order you can make, and that can be too much for a small garden. If you order garlic for planting, you might want to first find a gardening friend or two to share with!

This year, I ordered a Creole garlic variety, Ajo Rojo, and I will be sharing cloves with several friends. The Creole garlics are supposed to be among the soft-neck types most suited to very warm winters.

No gardener wants to encounter fire ants in the garden, but sometimes we find that they have moved in, unwanted. Getting rid of these pain-inflicting invaders can take some persistence, but options for organic control do exist. Knowing a little about the biology of these ants can help a gardener plan a successful counter-attack.

Flattened fire ant “mound” shows deer hoof print. PHOTO/Amygwh

Fire ants do not tolerate freezing weather very well. If you treat a fire ant mound in fall, even if the whole mound isn’t dead within a few weeks, enough workers can be killed that the rest of the colony doesn’t survive the winter.

In spring and fall, too, most of the ants in a colony will be closer to the surface, so that a mound drench type of product has a good chance of reaching all of them.

In other words, both fall and spring are when organic controls are more likely to work well. Killing off smaller colonies in fall will also reduce the number of new colonies next spring, when mated queens that survived the winter will fly off to start new colonies.

The very first control to try, though, doesn’t use any products at all. On a cool day after a rain (when more ants are nearer the surface), pour a few gallons of boiling water on the mound, starting by circling the mound a foot or so away and then pouring the rest right on the mound. If this doesn’t kill the whole colony, move on to “Plan B”, a purchased mound-drench or a bait. (NOTE: Boiling hot water can burn people when accidentally spilled, and it will also kill plants near the mound it is being poured on. Please handle boiling water carefully, and do not use it near trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, or other desired plants.)

Another option is called “bucketing”. You gather up a few buckets, dust the inside with talcum powder or corn starch (to keep the ants in), and on a cool morning dig quickly into the mound, dumping shovels full of dirt into your buckets. Dig deep enough to find the bottom of the mound. Add a generous squirt of dish soap to each bucket, and add water to drown the ants. This works on small mounds, but not on old, deep colonies.

One organic produce that contains d-Limonene, to be used as a drench, is Orange Guard Fire Ant Control. The d-Limonene products have worked pretty well in our area community gardens.

An organic product for fire ant control that uses spinosad as the active ingredient is Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew by Bonide. Instructions for using it as a mound drench are pretty far down the label, but they are there.

Remember to NOT disturb a mound in any way before using a product on or around the mound. If the ants are disturbed, they go into “defense mode”; a whole lot of ants will boil up out of the mound where they can’t be reached by a drench.

Fire ants are not easy to eradicate, and new colonies will continue to move in from surrounding areas if they can, even when old colonies are killed off. It is their way.

However, gardeners can be persistent, too. Knowing the best times to work on the mounds for best effect helps keep our gardens fire-ant free.

I received in the mail this week a great little reminder that this is the time to plant fall-flowering bulbs. The reminder was in the form of a cute little catalog from Harvesting History. The catalog is small enough to not be overwhelming, and the pictures are large enough to let you know what the flowers really look like.

The first couple of pages are given over to fall flowering bulbs, and the list includes several colchicums such as the waterlily crocus and white autumn crocus, fall blooming Bella Donna lilies, and hardy cyclamen. These are all hardy to zone 9, which makes them good choices for Southern gardens. The catalog also includes saffron crocus, another fall flower, which I have been growing in my zone 7b garden for many years.

Flower of the saffron crocus, a fall flowering bulb (actually a corm instead of a true bulb).

For me, saffron crocus reliably re-blooms year after year. It also multiplies enough that I have been able to share “extras” with friends. The saffron flowers appear around Halloween, when other plants are shutting down and turning into masses of dead foliage. The big lavender-colored flowers are a welcome sight!

These flowers are also the source of the saffron used in cooking, that most of us can’t afford to buy at the store.

The parts used in cooking are the stigmas, the three, bright red, thread-like bits that are the female parts inside each flower. To harvest, pick the stigmas by hand and dry them on a paper towel for a few days before storing.

I have, in the past, bought and planted bulbs (spring-flowering Angelique tulips – that were both beautiful and fragrant) that should work in zone 7 gardens, but my yard is enough “on the edge” that these died out over time. For my Southern garden, bulbs need to work in zone 8 or higher.

If you decide to add some fall-flowering bulbs to your garden this year, you can plant them now, and they should bloom within a month or two.

Many of the crops grown most successfully in fall are in the cabbage family. One funny thing I’ve learned as a gardener is that even the insects know that the collards, mustards, and radishes are more pungent than other crops in the group. The cabbage moths and cabbage white butterflies are less likely to lay eggs on them than on the milder members of the family: cabbages, pak choy, broccoli, and cauliflower.

Those milder flavored plants are going to need some protection. The moths and butterflies are not really the problem; it is their babies, the caterpillars, that eat huge holes in the leaves and leave slimy droppings (“frass”) all over the plants. The resultant mess is very unappetizing.

fall veggies under netting

In gardens that are managed organically, you can use a product that contains Bt for caterpillars to take care of the problem, but the easier option is to cover the plants with some kind of mesh, netting, or row cover. This will keep the flying adults away from the plants. If the moths and butterflies can’t reach the plants to lay eggs, then the caterpillar problem will never occur!

The netting needs to be draped over a support system that is high enough that the net is held away from the plants, even as they grow larger. In the picture in this blog post, bird netting that I use in spring over my strawberry bed is draped over supports to protect some small kale and pak choy plants.

Becky’s Aunt Joanie Beans, planted in early August.

It might not be the most lovely thing in a front-yard vegetable garden, but the support and netting will only be there for a couple of months. By the end of November, the plants won’t need the protection. The moths and butterflies will be gone, or close to gone, for the year.

Elsewhere in the garden, my patch of heirloom beans, my friend Becky’s Aunt Joanie Beans, is full of flowers. I even see a few tiny beans! So far, all is well.

The snipped leaf-edges you can see in the pictures are in my garden right now. I pulled back one of the folded-over pieces to show you the caterpillar inside. When the little guy gets bigger, his head will be bright red. This is one more feature, besides the odd damage on the leaves, that makes this caterpillar easy to identify.

These come every year to my late-planted beans. The first year I saw them in abundance, though, was 2012. I made a little video, with the help of my younger son, to tell gardeners about them.

One of the great features of cool season vegetables, the ones that survive the frosts and freezes of fall and early winter here in the Southeastern US, is that they are not space-hogs.

Red Russian kale might get to be pretty big (two to three feet across and high), but it isn’t going to sprawl across ten feet of garden the way a tomato plant can, and it won’t tower so high — like corn or okra — that it casts shade on the whole rest of the garden.

Even better, a lot of the cool season crops are in the “cut-and-come-again” group of leafy greens. You can harvest some leaves, and the plants will keep producing. The plants might stop for a while during cold weather, but in the warm stretches between, they will continue to grow.

Here in my zone 7b garden, I have already started a few seeds for my fall garden. The first little batch of seeds includes some kale, collards, beets, winter radishes, and some green bunching onions. In a couple of weeks, I will start a little more of all of those, plus some lettuces.

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